Digital Familism: Individual Differences in how Adolescents’ Digital Interactions with Family relate to their Momentary Affect

• In Event: Adolescents’ Cultural Contexts and Competencies across Digital Landscapes

Abstract

Introduction: Familism consists of strong familial interdependence, social support, and family obligation, and is associated with positive psychological and physiological outcomes during adolescence. Moreover, recent work has underscored that familism likely differs across environmental constraints, cultures, and momentary social contexts. Given that adolescents are increasingly relying upon digital media to maintain social relationships, this study sought to examine digital familism – the process of using digital media to connect with family. Specifically, we examined the link between adolescents’ digital interactions with family and their emotional affect, and whether these links differed by individual differences in adolescents’ age, racial and ethnic background, gender, and experiences of providing instrumental and emotional support to the family.
Methods: A racially-diverse sample of (N = 212, Mage = 15.5 years, 56.2% girls) adolescents reported their digital interactions with their family in the past hour and their momentary positive and negative affect for two weeks (2,202 observations). Data on digital interactions and momentary affect were collected during ecological momentary assessments, which were prompted three times a day (i.e., morning, afternoon, evening) via a mobile app. Data on whether adolescents provided instrumental and emotional support to their families were collected once daily, during a 4th evening survey.
Results: Adolescents interacted with their family at 9.5% of time points. As shown in Table 1, adolescents felt increased positive and increased negative affect in hours when they had digitally interacted with their family, controlling for between-subject effects. As shown in Figure 1, among adolescents who provided emotional support to their family, digital interactions with their family were associated with more positive affect.
Conclusion: These findings highlight the prevalence of adolescents’ digital connections with their family and provide insight into how these interactions associate with momentary functioning. Further, these findings suggest that digital familism may affords adolescents with unique characteristics with momentary affective benefits. Future studies should continue considering how cultural influences uniquely contribute to adolescents’ digital experiences and employ momentary designs to assess causality in the bidirectional links between digital interactions with family and affect.

Authors

• Shedrick Lamar Garrett, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
  Presenting Author

• Emma Armstrong-Carter, Stanford University

• Amy Xu, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

• Mitchell J Prinstein, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

• Eva H Telzer, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill